Strollerderby : neglect

Mom Arrested for Having 555 Pound Son

Brett Singer — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

This story is not to be confused with the one Madeline brought us, about the 550 pound woman who gave birth recently.

14-year-old Alexander Deundray Draper of South Carolina had been on the run with his mother, Jerri Althea Gray. Gray had been told by a family court judge to turn her son over to the state because they determined that he "was of the weight where it was decided by medical authorities that he needed treatment that was not being provided for by his mother."

That weight is 555 pounds.

According to CNN, the mother did not appear in court as ordered, "and has concealed the child."

It's one thing to be a little on the chunky side. But when your child is this heavy, clearly some enabling is going on. Barring some bizarre medical condition I'm unaware of, it doesn't seem possible for someone to reach 555 pounds at any age, much less 14, without a diet of nothing but unhealthy food. Hopefully everyone involved in this case will get the help that they need.

Source: CNN

550-Pound Woman Gives Birth

Baby Asleep On Dad's Head

Hit Her Cat, She'll Hit Your Kid

Morning News - Mike Tyson's Daughter Injured

Dad Charges Daughter With Grand Theft Auto

OctoMom's Kid - Bite Mark And Black Eye

They Say: Abuse Changes a Child's Brain

Kate Tuttle — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:26:00 GMT

Researchers who had previously studied the relationships between stress responses and maternal nurturing in animals have taken their work into a new arena, looking at how human brains are affected, in adulthood, by abuse and neglect suffered in childhood. The study, carried out at McGill University in Montreal, is very small (it compared the brains of 12 suicide victims who had been abused to 12 suicide victims who had not been, against a control group of 12 non-suicide brains) but, many in the field agree, could lead to larger-scale research into how childhood trauma can cause lifelong damage to a person's ability to handle stress.

Like so many studies of how human beings work, this one seems to only confirm the obvious: who among us wouldn't instinctively know that a terrible childhood leaves permanent scars? And yet it goes further than that -- if a biological brain difference is found, therapies could be developed that would offer some hope of healing those previously unhealable wounds. And just as the researchers' previous work had looked at the multi-generational effect of both good and bad animal parenting, perhaps their ultimate goal would be to figure out how to end the cycle of bad human parenting, one formerly abused or neglected child at a time.

More By This Author:

California Daycare Closed; Worker Was Mocking Kids' Genitals

Bad Science: How The Autism Vaccine Scare Snowballed

Preteen Accused of Shooting Dad's Pregnant Girlfriend

North Dakota Passes Law Establishing "Personhood" at Conception

Girl, 3, raised by dogs after her alcoholic mother neglected her.

Cole Gamble — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Social workers in Russia discovered a three-year-old girl in her mother's house, naked and walking on all fours, gnawing bones with the dogs that she clung to for warmth.

The girl, known as Madina, knows only two words: yes and no. Her mother Anna, 23, would frequently disappear of just be too drunk to care for the child. Normally, when Anna ate dinner at the table, Madina ate scraps off the floor with the dogs.

Because of her inability to relate to other children, Madina is an outcast where she lives, only capable of relating to her dog companions. One social worker commented that little Madina has know no other love than that of her mother’s dog.

When police arrived to take the child into care, Anna reportedly claimed: 'I do look after my daughter.'

Despite a life entirely spent in the shadow of neglect, medics say Madina is mentally and physically healthy.

4 Ways Birth and Breastfeeding Will Ruin Sex

Octo-Mom Erupts! Video Showdown with Octo-Mom and Her Mother Over Babies

Musical SpongeBob Rectal Thermometer. Fun for Your Kid’s Butt?

My Wife Says: 10 Reasons to Get Plastic Surgery after the Baby

10 Things They Don’t Tell You about Parenting

The 12 Do’s and Don’ts of Throwing Your Kid’s Birthday Party

Things You Should Never Say at a Chuck E Cheese Birthday Party

They Say: More Abuse, Neglect Among Bottle-Feeding Mothers

Kate Tuttle — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:01:00 GMT

The nutritional and health benefits of breastfeeding are, of course, well-known, as is the general medical recommendation that nursing is the overall best method of feeding one's baby. Most research on breast versus bottle focuses on physical health and wellbeing, from allergies to asthma to obesity -- but what if the choice has ramifications beyond the actual realm of feeding?

A new study out of Australia reports that failure to breastfeed one's baby is associated with higher levels of infant maltreatment, including neglect, emotional and physical abuse, and sexual molestation. Researchers looking at a longitudinal study of nealry 6,000 mothers and their children found that mothers who did not nurse were 3.8 times more likely to mistreat their children than those who did, and that the duration of breastfeeding had an effect on those numbers.

From the article:

They found that of the 1421 women who did not breastfeed their children in the group, 102 women - or 7.2 per cent - neglected or abused their child in some way. This compared with 4.8 per cent of the 2584 women who breastfed for less than four months and 1.6 per cent of the 2616 women who breastfed for more than four months.

What are we to make of this? Does the very act of nursing a baby elicit feelings that would tend to mitigate against any otherwise present urges to hurt or neglect her? Is the bonding that takes place over a Boppy really that powerful? Or is it a case of correlation, not caustion, with mothers in the groups least likely to breastfeed -- poor, young, less well-educated -- also at risk for abuse and neglect for environmental reasons?

I'm as big a proponent of nursing as anyone I know, but even I have a hard time believing that breastfeeding alone is the decisive factor in whether or not one mistreats a child. And while I'd like to see data from studies like this used to help promote breastfeeding among populations where strong advocacy is useful, I'm worried it will be used, instead, to further alienate or villify those mothers who are most in need of hearing positive reasons to breastfeed. What do you think? Is there a way to read this that doesn't feel judgmental and divisive?

More by this author:

Does Obama's Election Mean Black Kids Now Have "No Excuses"?

Would You Toilet-Train Your Child On National TV?

Biracial Twins -- Is One "Black" and One "White"?

Death by Peanut: Epidemic or Urban Myth?

Is This Baby Obese? Aussie Mom Says No

Does Obama's Election Mean Black Kids Now Have "No Excuses"?

Kate Tuttle — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Op-ed contributor Charles Blow, writing in the New York Times, recently assailed comments by South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn that, in a post-Obama age, "every child has lost every excuse." In other words, if a blak man can become president, you -- black child, Latino child, poor child -- can scale every mountain, too. I can see what Clyburn meant, that his aim was to both exhort and inspire (and he spoke these words at a BET event, which I think is significant), but Blow's right: "no excuses" is a vast overstatement of how even the playing field now is.

The statistics Blow cites can make you cry: 60% of black kids grow-up in low-income homes, half of them in what the government offically calls "poor" households (believe me, what the Feds call poor is several steps more grim than what you or I would). Black kids are twice as likely as their white and Latino counterparts to be the victims of mistreatment, ranging from neglect to physical abuse. They are far more likely to be raped.

I don't think it's an excuse to say that the circumstances in which a child grows up have an overwhelming influence on her or his opportunities to lead a happy, healthy life. Nor do I think that acknowledging the inequalities that still exist in our society is in any way throwing a damper on the incredibly inspiring story of Obama's rise to the presidency, nor on the real-world solutions all of us hope his adminstration can bring to bear on them. And while I like Clyburn's old-school call for kids to overcome whatever obstacles they face, I cringe at how a slogan like "no excuses" sounds in the mouth not of a black warrior for equal rights, but yet another clueless white conservative pundit. So yes, I hope that President Obama means, among many other things, that nobody will ever again assume a black child can't get there, but I also hope it means we can all work together to improve the chances that she or he will be able to.

And besides, it didn't seem to me as if having a President Bush in office prompted academically sub-par rich white kids to stop making excuses.

Teacher Wants to Drop Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, "For Obama"

More by this author:

Would You Toilet-Train Your Child On National TV?

Biracial Twins -- Is One "Black" and One "White"?

Death by Peanut: Epidemic or Urban Myth?

Is This Baby Obese? Aussie Mom Says No

Dad Shackles Overweight Daughter to Bed to Stop Her Eating

JeanneSager — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:33:00 GMT

It started with chains and locks on the cabinet doors of the family home to keep his daughter away from the food. When Robert Blue found his fifteen-year-old was getting past them, police say he decided to chain the girl to her bed and beat her with a stick.

The problem? The teen was twenty pounds over the weight her father thought appropriate.

Theres's no excuse for it, but the extreme methodology to make a child lose weight may not be that uncommon.

Obese kids are often at risk of being treated poorly by their peers - and obese adults by other "skinnier" adults. Then throw in the stigma for parents of obese kids. Malnutrition and neglect are most often linked to the words "child abuse," but these days childhood obesity is earning parents the stinkeye - for being too permissive and putting their kids at significant health risks. Two years ago, a British mother was told to put her eight-year-old on a diet or she'd lose custody.

So what are parents doing? Mostly uneducated themselves about proper nutrition and weight loss (studies have also shown most obese kids have at least one obese parent), they go to extremes. They enforce strict diets and padlock the cabinets. They impart little knowledge of how to eat well, exercise and modify their lives, instead believing they can discipline away the fat - which, any of us who have ever lost weight know, doesn't work.

The methods described by Blue's local Nevada TV station are nothing short of criminal - and clearly abusive. But how many parents are just a few steps short of this themselves? Sadly, studies have actually proven child abuse can be a trigger FOR obesity into adulthood. Which points directly back to the Blue case. Child abusers break down a child's self-esteem, upping their chances of overeating. And what happens then? More abuse.

Image: Fox News Vegas

Is It Neglect To Deny Surgery For Religious Reasons?

Kate Tuttle — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:35:00 GMT

Amish parents Gideon and Barbara Hershberger's son, Eli, now one and a half, was born with a heart defect that is fixable through surgery, but the couple's refusal to allow the invasive procedure may see them losing their son to the state. Claiming that the procedure violates their religious principles, the Amish family is fighting to retain the right to decide what treatment Eli gets, but the state of New York's Department of Social Services, charging neglect, is demanding that the boy be taken from them so that he can be operated on. A judge is expected to make the ruling on December 23.

Cases like this -- which would also include Christian Scientist parents and those who believe, as the Jehovah's Witnesses do, that blood transfusions are forbidden -- pit such strongly-held beliefs against one another that they are almost impossible to parse. On the one hand, the role of parents in making medical decisions for their children is a fundamental right most of us would fight for (particularly in our own families). But on the other, if a child can be saved by a procedure that is performed thousands of times a year, who on earth would let that child just die for his or her parents' religious beliefs?

More by this author:

Is This Baby Obese? Aussie Mom Says No
Baby Nearly Starves to Death, Diluted Formula to Blame
Grandmother’s Right? Or Totally Obnoxious?
Health Scam: Crisis Pregnancy Centers
Mama’s Got a Brand New Bag

Another Child Dies Due to Faith Healing

Cole Gamble — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In a story reminiscent of the Wisconsin girl who died of diabetes while her parents prayed, a boy from a faith-healing family in Oregon died of a highly treatable urinary tract blockage on Tuesday. This is the second child of the Followers of Christ church to die since March. According to Oregon law, however, the 16-year-old boy’s parent may not be responsible for neglect.

Oregon state law allows minors 14 and older to be responsible for their own medical decisions. The family in this case is claiming the boy made the conscious choice to eschew regular medicine and turn to prayer. The prayer failed when the blockage caused urea to poison the organs in his system, eventually leading to heart failure.

In March the boy’s niece, a 15-month-old, died at home of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection. Her parents have pleaded not guilty to manslaughter charges.

These are not the first incidents of child deaths within the Followers of Christ church. After earlier deaths involving children of Followers of Christ believers, a 1999 Oregon law struck down religious shields for parents who treat their children solely with prayer.

Mom Gets Fifteen Years For Unnecessary Surgeries on Son

Kelly Mills — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:34:00 GMT

From the department of "Eeeeesh!" comes this story: Two of Laurie Williamson's children were in wheelchairs and had feeding tubes. Her three kids altogether had at least 500 doctor's appointments in ten years in connection with a rare illness. And Williamson raised $150,000 between 2000 and 2005 from individuals and organizations for her kids' health issues.

One problem with this scenario: Prosecutors say she fabricated the illnesses to get the money. And she was convicted of child abuse and sentenced to 15 years for putting her son through two unnecessary surguries, for a nerve-stimulation device and a gastric feeding-button. The children were malnourished when they were taken into protective custody. She also told the kids they had a rare condition and would not survive past their teens. However, it's more likely she herself has a somewhat rare condition: Munchausen syndrome by proxy, where a person makes up or induces symptoms in another to get attention. And in this case, $150,000.

The kids are now with a relative, and their mom is not allowed contact.

Update: Praying Parents Charged With Homicide

Cole Gamble — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The Wisconsin couple whose 11-year-old daughter died of treatable diabetes after said parents eschewed medical attention for prayer were charged Monday with second-degree reckless homicide. The father has stated he thought his daughter's illness was a “test of faith”, and I have no doubt he and his wife prayed until they could pray no more, but I wonder that now they have failed this “test” where their faith stands. Well, I guess you could always ask Job. The mother and father both face 25 years years in prison if convicted.

The main question that will come out of this trial, and the one you'll definitely hear from the attorneys for the defenses is this: is trying this couple a form of religious persecution? After all this couple did seek help in the best way they knew how, spiritually. Does it really count as criminal neglect if modern medicine doesn't factor into their belief system?

You can look at my original article for my stance on belief versus reality and where the two can work together.

What do you think: if a parent does what they believe is right, is that grounds for homicide? Extreme faith certainly isn't illegal, and it seems like we are dealing with a similar case of the state's idea of child welfare versus the tenets of faith in the case of the Texas polygamy sect.

Perhaps you think actively choosing ignorance might be a criminal offense. My question is, why do some religious people find common sense so antithetical to faith?

Strollerderby : neglect

Mom Arrested for Having 555 Pound Son

Mom Puts 9 Year Old Girl On Craigs List For Revenge

550-Pound Woman Gives Birth

Baby Asleep On Dad's Head

Hit Her Cat, She'll Hit Your Kid

Morning News - Mike Tyson's Daughter Injured

Dad Charges Daughter With Grand Theft Auto

OctoMom's Kid - Bite Mark And Black Eye

They Say: Abuse Changes a Child's Brain

Girl, 3, raised by dogs after her alcoholic mother neglected her.

Should You Take A Risk on Orgasmic Birth? (Orgasmic Birth Video included)

4 Ways Birth and Breastfeeding Will Ruin Sex

Octo-Mom Erupts! Video Showdown with Octo-Mom and Her Mother Over Babies

They Say: More Abuse, Neglect Among Bottle-Feeding Mothers

Does Obama's Election Mean Black Kids Now Have "No Excuses"?

Dad Shackles Overweight Daughter to Bed to Stop Her Eating

Famed Child Killer Mary Bell is Now a Granny

They Say: Parents Pack Bad Lunches

Mom Shoplifts Parenting Book With Kids in Tow

Biggest Loser's Having a Baby, Gaining Weight

They Say: Margarine Makes You Stupid

Is It Neglect To Deny Surgery For Religious Reasons?

Another Child Dies Due to Faith Healing

Mom Gets Fifteen Years For Unnecessary Surgeries on Son

Update: Praying Parents Charged With Homicide